Thursday, September 16, 2010

This just came to me and I thought that it might be a good idea to write it down. And be forewarned, I don't really mean for this to be something that people besides me will read. I mean, I'm writing it mostly for myself, but if you want to have a peek, that is fine by me. Another forewarning. It will get technical at times, mostly in an electronics sort of way.

The surface of the ping pong table would be embedded with leds. Set up in a simple matrix. These leds would be an interactive table top for experimentation in new gameplay. Then I would have some sensors in the table, so that when the ping pong ball hit the table, it would be able to detect where it hit. I won't need to have a sensor for each led. I could probably get away with 3 or six sensors and use them to triangulate the location of the ball hit. The propeller has built in sin/trig tables that should come in great handy for this. So some of the game ideas would be a simple sort of "breakout" type game. One thing to mention is that I don't intend to have games meant for single players. I think that playing games in single player can ruin the full potential for fun-ness in games. So, when playing the game, it would be played against another player trying to defend their lights. There might even be ways for players to be able to set up defense formations in some sort of strategy variation.

This part is about creating led drivers based on a buck converter setup.Driving leds with a buck converter might be cheaper than driving leds with a simple series resistor. This cheapness would be achieved because I would be able to use the same parts to make a driver for every single led(Standard smaller sizes) that I can think of. I have seen that wildly different inductor values can be used. I will also need to look into using a buck converter/led driver topology that uses the led in place of the standard or schotkey diode. This should increase the efficiency of the driver. That is really the reason why a buck converter would be used instead of a series resistor, to save power, make things oost less to run, reduce the waste energy I wonder though, how many pins will it take to use these led buck converters. What sort of system could i use to minimize the pins used, or, to put it another way, maximize the leds per pin. I wonder how many leds could be powered by one buck converter in some sort of polling/scanline setup. This may get complicated. I need to draw some circuit sketches.

This post was partially fueled by pink floyd and other, little, things.